"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

---

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
256 pp. Knopf. $24.00

Reviewed by Paul Stotts

---

Considering that "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a review at this point is a bit silly and self-satisfying. You already know the book is extremely good. There is nothing revelatory that I can add to a review, I can only restate what others have said, but feel so affected by the book that I must address it, even in the face of being redundant.

"The Road" is a brilliant, stark book dripping with absolute bleakness and despair that transcends most human experience. It is the literary equivalent of what the utter lack of hope in life must feel like, an ugly grotesqueness that is alien to most of our emotional landscapes.

Such an absolute lack of hope is something that the majority of people, thankfully, never truly experience. The all-consuming feeling that the struggle for life is fruitless is unnatural, it is not human qua human. The brilliance of McCarthy's novel is that it highlights something so deeply human, the enduring loving relationship between a father and his son in the face of extremely dire circumstances, and places this aspect of beauty in an alien and bleak world filled with no conceivable hope.

The prose is poetic and strong, establishing a desperate, stark tone in an almost childishly straightforward, yet realistic manner. McCarthy's grammatical simplicity will likely be studied to death by literature students in the future. The story is amazing, constantly punching me emotionally and intellectually, to where the novel lingers with me days after I have finished. Like all transcendent experiences, it is something that one does not easily forget.

Last Word:
This struggle for survival of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic future is poignant, beautiful, deeply moving and emotionally troublesome and draining. It is artwork of the highest degree, full of contradictions, answers and questions, comments and revelations, beauty and ugliness. A absolute must read.

Final Word: 97 out of 100